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This is What a Tor Supporter Looks Like: Edward Snowden

In mid-October, the Tor Project had an opportunity to interview Edward Snowden. Below are key excerpts from the conversation.

Tor: What would you say to a non-technical person about why they should support and care about Tor?

ES: Tor is a critical technology, not just in terms of privacy protection, but in defense of our publication right -- our ability to route around censorship and ensure that when people speak their voices can be heard. The design of the Tor system is structured in such a way that even if the US Government wanted to subvert it, it couldn't because it's a decentralized authority. It's a volunteer based network. Nobody's getting paid to run Tor relays -- they're volunteers worldwide. And because of this, it provides a built-in structural defense against abuses and most types of adversaries. Tor provides a level of safety, a level of guarantee, to the confidentiality, and in some cases anonymity of human communications. I think this is an incredible thing because it makes us more human. We are at the greatest peace with ourselves when nobody's watching.

Tor: Can you talk about how the world would be different if Tor did not exist?

ES: Without Tor, the streets of the Internet become like the streets of a very heavily surveilled city. There are surveillance cameras everywhere, and if the adversary simply takes enough time, they can follow the tapes back and see everything you've done. With Tor, we have private spaces and private lives, where we can choose who we want to associate with and how, without the fear of what that is going to look like if it is abused. What the Tor network allows is what's called a mixed routing experience where, due to a voluntary cooperation of peers around the Internet -- around the world, across borders, across jurisdictions -- you get individuals who are able to share traffic in ways that don't require them to be able to read the content of it. So you don't have to trust every participant of the Tor network to know who you are and what you're looking for.

Tor: Did you know that Tor is run by a non-profit organization?

ES: Yes, Tor has been extremely open. Almost everybody who is involved in development has an online presence; they're involved in online engagement. You can drop into the IRC and talk to these people directly and ask them questions, or criticize them (laughs). It's a very open and inclusive community, and I think that's incredibly valuable. They also have a very rich and well-supported mailing list, which is very helpful for people who want to move beyond being a passive user of Tor and actually start being an active participant in expanding the network, in running a relay node from your home, or even starting to experiment with running an exit, which I think is one of the most interesting parts of the Tor experience.

i do agree : tor & more projects like this one contribute in the fight for your us rights. it stays an individual tool inside a small association but it is not an organization with real goals in a real life. i know that tor works also like a community and it is helpful abroad but most official sites reject tor. i use tor because i am protected from individual & state surveillance but the journalists/investigators do not respect the privacy.

I once submitted information about the perpetrator (already in custody) of a horrible crime to an "anonymous" Police Tips site.

Within hours of sending the info, the director of the regional law enforcement forensics lab accidentally sent me a "friend request" on Facebook. Their "BFF" was a digital forensic analyst at some little corporation in Redmond, Washington.

It was immediately clear to me, having made the same mistake personally, what had happened and after the shock of "betrayal" wore off I messaged the director and asked how they knew me. POOF! The request was withdrawn in minutes. (FB makes it all too easy to click on the wrong button and accidentally send a friend request.)

It has been awhile now, a few years. I submitted "anonymous" information about my lifestyle to these "good" folks in law enforcement who, in turn, immediately betrayed my trust and their own promise of "anonymity." Somewhere in their files is my "anonymous" submission with my name "all over it." While there's nothing criminal in it, it would still destroy me, my family and my professional life immediately were it to be revealed.

The entire story is probably Hollywood worthy but I'll stop right here.

I have had same stories ... the admin of the site (interpol) have been driven to an hospital -mental disorder- ... .
Using tor should not have avoided that.
But eu decided after this scandal to examine carefully the case and allow now an anonymous request (at least officially).
Tor cannot transform a dumb-admin in a professional one.

Your IP is shown to websites when you visit. The government maintains a active database of what IP belongs to whom as the ISP's provide that information.

Also computers leave a digital signature (screen size, operating system and browser choice) that is also recorded.

The longer you use the same machine, the more accounts and time you enter your real information, the more they can just finger you in a second.

TOR isn't completely private, it just hides your IP.

When the FBI took over Freedom Hosting, they used a Javascript flaw in the TOR browser to get the real IP and other information from users at the other end of the TOR network.

Since there are always vulnerabilities in software, you can't trust anything 100% for long. One shot with one machine that can't be traced to you, with one IP that many people use and without being seen or recorded using it.

It has to be assumed that the NSA is recording all TOR related internet traffic at the ISP's and thus can put all the pieces together.

I think Edward got busted on TOR and to make it safely out of the country and needed a bargaining chip for entry into a safe haven location like Russia. Stealing the NSA files was part of that, the exposure thing was not so much for the people and change, but for himself.

Edward was making over $200,000 a year, lived in Hawaii, likely drove a nice car and had a sweet bartender girlfriend.

He gives all that up in a second? Why not sneak the files out and leak them anonymously? After all then he could just later quit his job and nobody would know it was him. Sure the government would watch him for a very long time, but they couldn't do anything without proof.

>TOR isn't completely private, it just hides your IP.
tor is not a vpn , it does not just hide your ip, it does better
i guess using the word "private" you mean not absolutely secure with a high level of privacy hidden in a vault locked by superman (wonderwoman guarding your home 24/24).

>nsa and others ... waste money & time ; their job is also to make money and to regulate the official market on the net.

> Edward was making over $200,000 a year, lived in Hawaii, likely drove a nice car and had a sweet bartender girlfriend.

But you are not criticizing anyone's Significant Other? Just checking.

> He gives all that up in a second?

Clearly not everyone has a moral compass. Thankfully this lamentable fact does not prevent courageous people, like Snowden, from recognizing that they have a moral responsibility to become a whistle-blower.

> Why not sneak the files out and leak them anonymously? After all then he could just later quit his job and nobody would know it was him. Sure the government would watch him for a very long time, but they couldn't do anything without proof.

You could do with a viewing of Citizen Four. Snowden explained very clearly why he chose not to try to leak the files anonymously, but to defect to the People by revealing his identity and describing how he had obtained the documents.

First, the most common ignorantly repeated line: Edward Snowden did not "flee" TO Russia... he was transitting from Hong Kong, and the US revoked his passport - probably knowingly, meaning the USG knew that people would mindlessly, and ignorantly, perpetuate the myth that he fled to Russia.

> I think Edward got busted on TOR and to make it safely out of the country and needed a bargaining chip for entry into a safe haven location like Russia. Stealing the NSA files was part of that, the exposure thing was not so much for the people and change, but for himself.

The facts decisively contradict both of these suppositions.

See Greenwald's book No Place to Hide for an account of the last minute decision to try to help Snowden travel from China to a third party via Russia. You will no doubt be intrigued by the apparent involvement of Wikileaks.

> Edward was making over $200,000 a year, lived in Hawaii, likely drove a nice car and had a sweet bartender girlfriend.

You aren't criticizing anyone's significant other, I trust? Just checking.

> He gives all that up in a second?

Clearly not everyone can easily accept the suggestion that some people possess a moral sensibility. But we wish to assure you that some people *do* know right from wrong. And what the NSA was doing, and is continuing to do, is wrong as wrong can be.

> Why not sneak the files out and leak them anonymously? After all then he could just later quit his job and nobody would know it was him. Sure the government would watch him for a very long time, but they couldn't do anything without proof.

Snowden himself has stated that he took the sysadmin job in Hawaii specifically to obtain an important document his previous sysadmin job did not allow him to access. He always intended to leak the documents, and he has stated (and Greenwald backs this up) that he always intended to come forward as the source of the files, in order to prevent the USG from claiming that the documents were fakes.

>TOR isn't completely private, it just hides your IP.
Of course Tor "isn't completely private", but it does much more than just hide your IP.
The last few versions of Tor Browser Bundle protect you in many other ways:
1. It anonymizes your browser fingerprint as much as possible, using a common screen size, user agent string, etc. It also blocks Canvas fingerprinting and WebRTC.
2. A few add-ons greatly reduce the chances of data leakage or browser exploitation: NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere, Disconnect.Me.
3. Intuitive security levels with reasonable default settings help the user balance privacy and browsing experience without compromising too much on security or making the usual mistakes that people do when they have too much to configure.

>there are always vulnerabilities in software
Absolutely. Unfortunately, Tor is the best tool we have. Make a better one, if you like. Or better yet, improve it.

>NSA is recording all TOR related internet traffic at the ISP's and thus can put all the pieces together.
You know, some ISPs are not in America. Also, what good will this do? Crypto. Please read the Tor protocol, and if you have a viable attack that has not previously been discussed, announce it and demo a proof of concept. The community will be greatful.

>I think
Important words.

>Edward got busted on TOR
Evidence?

>needed a bargaining chip for entry into a safe haven location like Russia. Stealing the NSA files was part of that
Nice, accusing someone of a terrible crime with no evidence.

The sequence of Snowden's communications and travels, as well as his exfiltration of secret documents, are documented in detail by a large number of witnesses and involved people, including Micah F. Lee (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Laura Poitras (reporter), Glenn Greenwald (reporter), Ewen McAskill (reporter), Julian Assange (Wikileaks), Sarah Harrison (Wikileaks), the US State Department, Director of National Intelligence, and the heads of state and various other public officials in the governments of Hong Kong, Ecuador, the PRC, the USA, and Russia. All these stories, and Snowden's, match up perfectly. The chance that all the involved departments of all these countries' governments could agree on a fabrication with each other and with Wikileaks and several opposition journalists working for different outlets is extremely small.

The story does not match yours at all.

>the exposure thing was not so much for the people and change, but for himself
He admitted as much - he announced his identity to keep himself safe. No news there.

>After all then he could just later quit his job and nobody would know it was him.
O RLY.

because of criminal elements getting retribution. because of reputations. because the criminal he reported may have been in the police. or the mafia. or high level military. or friends with jason bourne. Or Batman.
Being a whistleblower is dangerous.
Chelsea Manning might have gotten away with it if she wasn't dobbed on. That destroyed her life.
So , see, the story is not bullshit at all. It was risky to provide the information that person did and they had to do it anonymously
Tor saves lives every day for this reason
It was important I clarify your reply so other people don't get the wrong idea about the original message

> Within hours of sending the info, the director of the regional law enforcement forensics lab accidentally sent me a "friend request" on Facebook. Their "BFF" was a digital forensic analyst...

I've had a very similar experience. However, this might not have been an error--- "analysts" often deliberately try to "friend" a "person of interest" under a false name, using some pretext, such as claiming to be a former schoolmate.

Tip lines and help lines for persons experiencing emotional distress are manifestly appropriate candidates for being accessible over Tor, or even being run as Hidden Services. See the first few pages of the fine book Dragnet Nation by Julian Angwin for another pointed example.

Everyone who uses Tails should know that this project would not be possible without the Debian Project, which was founded by Ian Murdock in 1993. Sadly, we have just lost him under mysterious circumstances involving a US police department.

> With a heavy heart Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock, stalwart proponent of Free Open Source Software, Father, Son, and the 'ian' in Debian. Ian started the Debian project in August of 1993, releasing the first versions of Debian later that same year. Debian would go on to become the world's Universal Operating System, running on everything from embedded devices to the space station.

Given the manner in which all the world's governments seem to be taking a sharp turn towards fascism, perhaps setting the stage for a global genocide targeting anyone who is perceived as in some way "different" from others, and given the way in which privacy advocates seem to lose every public policy or legal battle in those countries which falsely claim to obey the Rule of Law, suicide increasingly appears to be a rational response. Over the years, more than one thoughtful writer has argued that what the law calls "mental illness" often reflects a particular sensitivity to injustice, inequity, and malintent and deception on the part of the ruling elite.

> The thoughts of the Debian Community are with Ian's family in this hard time.

> His family has asked for privacy during this difficult time and we very much wish to respect that. Within our Debian and the larger Linux community condolences may be sent to in-memoriam-ian@debian.org where they will be kept and archived.

> He amazed everyone whom he worked with for the depth of his thinking, passion and experience. He was truly brilliant and an inspiration to many of us; his death is a loss to all whom he has known and touched.

> [Ian] always subordinated his personal work, and even his technical preferences, to the principles that produce the best code for the most people. Those principles won’t die, and are proved every time we use code Murdock wrote or inspired – something none of us who use technology can avoid.

Something important for Tails users to know:

> Ian's dream has lived on, the Debian community remains incredibly active, with thousands of developers working untold hours to bring the world a reliable and secure operating system.

From Cory Doctorow:

> The Debian project fundamentally shifted the way free/open code got made by fusing an insistence on engineering excellence with a public declaration of the ethical nature of doing free software development.

People who want to remember Ian, or who appreciate what the Debian Project does, can donate:

> As we reported a few days ago, Ian Murdock, the creator of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution project, died in rather unclear circumstances last week. Until more details emerge, it seems wise to refrain from speculation about what really happened. Far better to celebrate what is not in doubt: his important contribution to free software at a critical period in its growth.

Plus one.

> In November 1999, I spoke to Murdock at length, during one of the 50 interviews that form the backbone of my book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. Inevitably, I was only able to use a few quotations from Murdock in the book's text, and now seems an appropriate moment to give a more complete version of how Murdock came to create Debian, told in his own words.

The apt package manager introduced by Ian was the key innovation which made Debian an instant success. It is absolutely essential to how anyone can easily install enormous open source systems such as R which are essential for anyone engaged in political activism (at least if you want to catch the bad guys lying with statistics).

> enormous open source systems such as R which are essential for anyone engaged in political activism (at least if you want to catch the bad guys lying with statistics).

R is used extensively not only by the good guys (data-driven journalists) but also by the bad guys (GCHQ and NSA), as documented in several Snowden leaked documents, most recently the HIMR problem set:

Just as Tor is used extensively not only by good guys (human rights workers, muckraking journalists, political activists around the world, political dissidents in repressive countries, union organizers targeted by Walmart type mega-corporations, hacktivists targeting our enemies, such as HBGary Federal, Hacking Team, etc) but also by the bad guys (government agents, corporate spooks and shills, and criminal syndicates holding hospital databases hostage).

Technology provides tools. It's up to the individual whether to use them for good or evil.

I'm not trolling, I really support the people I mentioned and what they do. Seems that Tor project are focusing on civil rights and leftists. Personally I don't care about them but I fully understand that everyone needs completely anonymous, unregulated and uncensorable internet.

>Tor project are not focusing on civil rights (there are a lot of others organizations) but most of them are living in the us and believe that it is their ... duty maybe.
> no, everyone does not need your *internet* vision, i know a lot of users who do prefer to be monitored and do not wish to be anonymous or to access at an unrestricted/uncensored internet.

I probably wouldn't choose the same people you would, but I totally agree with you that more variety of champions would be good. We pulled together this donation drive at the last minute, on the theory that we'd best get some experience doing it. (EFF took many years to get where they are, so no time like now to get started.)

In particular, I think that the diversity of people who care about Tor is one of our biggest strengths. I look forward to showcasing that diversity more thoroughly for the next campaign.

> We pulled together this donation drive at the last minute, on the theory that we'd best get some experience doing it. (EFF took many years to get where they are, so no time like now to get started.)

I actually think you've featured a very impressive roster of supporters, and would prefer to see people like Matthew Green and Bruce Schneier featured before you get around to the people the poster mentioned.

> In particular, I think that the diversity of people who care about Tor is one of our biggest strengths. I look forward to showcasing that diversity more thoroughly for the next campaign.

Totally agree. I really hope this fund drive is a big success!

I think I understand why you chose to have your interviewees submit pictures and I think this is a great idea. Nevertheless it excludes human rights workers and others living in dangerous locales who have a very serious need for strong anonymity. Maybe the next campaign can be structured to allow some of them to say a few words about how they use Tor, without giving away anything too personally-specific.

I still hope Rob Thomas speaks up to explain how he reconciles recent US defense/IC contracts with his firms (you can find them in public records as easily as I did) square with his support of Tor. In cases like this, full disclosure is the best policy.

fair enough point.
for one thing Ross is in prison. He is also is directly responsible for dealing hard drugs to a lot of people. Hard drugs destroy lives. This is the opposite of admirable.

As an non profit organisation Tor needs to have a good public reputation. Aligning with convicted criminals of the magnitude of the aforementioned is not going to encourage people to give Tor the money it needs

As for Satoshi, well, if you can provide a photo and brief interview I'm sure Tor would field your suggestion

I'm not familiar with your other suggestions but seeing as one of them mentioned carding - that's seriously illegal - why do you think Tor the organisation would want to be seen supporting, advocating or be affiliated with that kind of behaviour? Why would anyone?

I am more grateful than I can say to Edward Snowden for his heroism in blowing the whistle on the unbounded amorality, unconstitutionality, criminality, duplicity, deviousness, "collect it all" mentality, technologically enabled lethality, and un-American terroristic activities* of the enemy of all Peoples everywhere, NSA. And to Glenn Greenwald for having the courage to report on the leaked documents.

Just the latest in long overdue reporting which would be impossible without Snowden's profound patriotism:

> Before former NSA contractor Edward Snowden exposed much of the agency's spying operations in 2013, there was little worry in the administration about the monitoring of friendly heads of state because it was such a closely held secret.

> All sorts of people who spent many years cheering for and defending the NSA and its programs of mass surveillance are suddenly indignant now that they know the eavesdropping included them and their American and Israeli friends rather than just ordinary people.

As a Tor supporter it is concerning when the blog is for used for loud accusations on non-privacy issues where partisanship seems to be the main qualification.

E.g. rubbish like the NSA deliberately "targets" children for drone strikes.

Lets stick to what we know. We already know far too much about mass surveillance that oversteps rational or constitutional bounds by national data collection agencies of many democracies -- and of dictatorships where no bounds even exist.

> We already know far too much about mass surveillance that oversteps rational or constitutional bounds by national data collection agencies of many democracies -- and of dictatorships where no bounds even exist.

I question whether in a democracy The People can actually "know far too much" about government abuses, but as a human rights activist, I am happy to agree with you that oppressive dictatorships must be denounced. I'd add that one hardly needs to spy on their communications to be aware that numerous governments are rather openly violating human rights of people within their borders (see rsf.org, hrw.org, etc).

As more whistleblowers bring out more documents, we will learn even more about the activities of NSA.

> As a Tor supporter it is concerning when the blog is for used for loud accusations on non-privacy issues where partisanship seems to be the main qualification.
>
> E.g. rubbish like the NSA deliberately "targets" children for drone strikes.

I understand why NSA employees don't like to think of themselves as working for a barbaric state-sponsored terrorism organization, but the facts are damning.

As you are probably aware, NSA and DOD employees are not permitted to read The Intercept, because articles there often cite documents leaked by a true American patriot, Edward Snowden. But when you get home, because there are obviously some things you should know that you don't yet know, I think you should really fire up Tails and go read this:

> U.S. DRONE OPERATORS are inflicting heavy civilian casualties and have developed an institutional culture callous to the death of children and other innocents, four former operators said at a press briefing today in New York.
>
> The killings, part of the Obama administration’s targeted assassination program, are aiding terrorist recruitment and thus undermining the program’s goal of eliminating such fighters, the veterans added. Drone operators refer to children as “fun-size terrorists” and liken killing them to “cutting the grass before it grows too long,” said one of the operators, Michael Haas, a former senior airman in the Air Force. Haas also described widespread drug and alcohol abuse, further stating that some operators had flown missions while impaired.

> The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.
>
> According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.
> ...
> The former JSOC drone operator is adamant that the technology has been responsible for taking out terrorists and networks of people facilitating improvised explosive device attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But he also states that innocent people have “absolutely” been killed as a result of the NSA’s increasing reliance on the surveillance tactic.
>
> One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members.

NSA knows about this problem, and has repeatedly taken the decision to simply ignore it. But this kind of decision will, if there is any justice, eventually enable the ICC to try them on war crimes charges. Notice the distinction between a trial in which the defendents have an experienced defense team, and the NSA's approach: "conviction" and execution by algorithm.

If memory serves, Snowden told Greenwald that he had decided to leak to Greenwald, rather than other reporters, because he had been impressed by Greenwald's passionate denunciation of the NSA murder of Abdulrahman al Awlaki, aged 16, by a *targeted* drone strike just a few weeks after the strike targeting his father, Anwar.

Another term of art used by the drone assassins: "bug splat" (derived from a violent video game). Greenwald was the first to point out the moral damage this causes to the young servicepersons (often hardly more than children themselves) who actually push the button that launches the Hellfire missile:

> For a new generation of young guns, the experience of piloting a drone is not unlike the video games they grew up on. Unlike traditional pilots, who physically fly their payloads to a target, drone operators kill at the touch of a button, without ever leaving their base – a remove that only serves to further desensitize the taking of human life. (The military slang for a man killed by a drone strike is “bug splat,” since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.)

Concerning the extralegality, the editorial boards of many major US papers have been compelled by the reporting of Greenwald and others to denounce the extrajudicial drone assassinations:

> Whether or not it succeeds in court, a lawsuit challenging the killings of Al Qaeda figure Anwar Awlaki and two other U.S. citizens clearly lays out the problems with the Obama administration's policy of "targeted killings" of suspected terrorists even outside the battle zone of Afghanistan.
>
> Allowing the president of the United States to act as judge, jury and executioner for suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens, on the basis of secret evidence is impossible to reconcile with the Constitution's guarantee that a life will not be taken without due process of law. Under the law, the government must obtain a court order if it seeks to target a U.S. citizen for electronic surveillance, yet there is no comparable judicial review of a decision to kill a citizen. No court is even able to review the general policies for such assassin
>
> The suit filed this month by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights seeks an after-the-fact determination that the killings of Awlaki, an associate named Samir Khan and Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, were not legal. The elder Awlaki and Khan were killed in a drone strike in Yemen in September; Abdulrahman Awlaki was the apparently unintended victim of a strike two weeks later.

NSA is the enemy of all people, everywhere, at any time. Even its own employees.

So please quit working for NSA, and become a dues-paying member of the ACLU. And don't forget to bring out more documents when you rejoin the rest of the human race.

> Department of Defense
> DIRECTIVE NUMBER 5200.27
> January 7, 1980
>
> SUBJECT: Acquisition of Information Concerning Persons and Organizations not Affiliated with the Department of Defense
> ...
> Information may be acquired [by military intelligence operatives] about activities threatening defense military and civilian personnel and defense activities and installations, including vessels, aircraft, communications equipment, and supplies. Only the following types of activities justify acquisition of information under the authority of this
paragraph:
> ...
> 4.1.3. Acts jeopardizing the security of DoD elements or operations or compromising classified defense information by unauthorized disclosure or by espionage.

So let me repeat: we need more USG employees to bring out documents when they defect to the People.

> Faheem Qureshi’s uncles sat with their neighbors, chatting, cracking jokes and sipping tea, in their family’s lounge for male guests. Qureshi, almost 14, stood nearby, bored and restless, thinking about when he could go to the nearby playground where he and the other Ziraki village kids played badminton and cricket.
>
> It had been a long day – Friday prayers, a food shopping errand at his mother’s behest, hosting – but also a happy occasion, as people stopped by to welcome an uncle home to North Waziristan, in tribal Pakistan, from a work excursion to the United Arab Emirates. Then he heard a sound like a plane taking off.
>
> About two seconds later, the missile punched a hole through the lounge. Qureshi remembers feeling like his body was on fire. He ran outside, wanting to throw water on his face, but his priority was escape. The boy could not see.
> ...
> It took nearly 40 days for Qureshi to emerge from a series of hospitals, all of which he spent in darkness. Shrapnel had punctured his stomach. Lacerations covered much of his upper body. Doctors operated on the entire left side of his body, which had sustained burns, and used laser surgery to repair his right eye. They could not save his left.
>
> His family kept the worst from him while he recuperated. Two of Qureshi’s uncles, Mohammed Khalil and Mansoor Rehman, were dead. So was his 21-year-old cousin Aizazur Rehman Qureshi, who was preparing to leave the family’s North Waziristan home for work, also in the UAE. Fourteen of Qureshi’s cousins were left fatherless.
>
> Barely a teenager, Qureshi was suddenly an elder male within his family, tasked with providing for his mother, brothers and sisters. Once a promising student who wanted a career in chemistry, his priority would become scrounging a living.

@ Drone killers: you did this. Feeling proud of your handiwork?

You can partially redeem yourself by providing documentary evidence to the people who are trying to bring up the USG/NSA/CIA leaders who ordered strikes like this on war crimes charges.

Incidentally, the heroic medical staff of MSF is evidently being deliberately targeted in Yemen by Saudi Air Force, which is well equipped with US provided planes and missiles. So there is another set of war criminals who must be brought to justice.

> Last week, in response to a long-running ACLU lawsuit, the Defense Department released 198 photos relating to prisoner abuse by U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. These photos are disturbing, but they are almost certainly less disturbing than the approximately 1,800 pictures the government is still keeping secret — and we’re still fighting for those in court under the Freedom of Information Act.

> Sixty of the 198 photos have legible Army criminal investigation file numbers printed on them. We used those numbers to search our Torture Database, which contains some 6,000 reports, investigations, emails, and other documents the government has been forced to release to us in the course of our 11-year-old FOIA suit.

Time and again, the Army dropped cases despite extensive evidence of abuses including numerous cases of prisoners tortured and killed by CIA, FBI, and US military while in USG custody.

So another group of war criminals who must be brought to justice.

Meanwhile, accused war criminal and CIA Director John Brennan is obviously feeling the heat. Good. Human rights campaigners are not going to just forget all about his crimes. We are going to keep digging up more evidence. We continue to share information with officials who may eventually issue an international arrest warrant. Our goal is to eventually see him arrested and prosecuted in the ICC or another court.

-Individuals are being marginalized.
-Decisions for our future are without the populations interests.
-We don't know what our governments are doing!?
-And when we do, we don't have a platform to question, see first line...
-When on occasion some do, they are labeled terrorist or pinned down by the state with endless bureaucracy of ~justice~ (first a beating, then, charges with no relevance to the issue at hand) for years.
-We are many they are few, still they rule without our input.
-Yes, some input but only by flagrantly being so wrong it would make the population rise, nothing less!
We desperately need Tor to protect our individual actions within a disorganized population from our own making of lack of understanding, our governments!

1 He made his way firsly to China and then to Russia. The both are geo-political adversaries of the USA. This looks like an attempt to trade USA secrets.
2 If he really had wanted to inform the society he would have disclosed everything immediately, not the time the info got obsolete.

Hi! There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.3.3.2-alpha from the usual place on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release some time in February.

Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.

Tor 0.3.3.2-alpha is the second alpha in the 0.3.3.x series. It introduces a mechanism to handle the high loads that many relay operators have been reporting recently. It also fixes several bugs in older releases. If this new code proves reliable, we plan to backport it to older supported release series.

Changes in version 0.3.3.2-alpha - 2018-02-10

Major features (denial-of-service mitigation):

Give relays some defenses against the recent network overload. We start with three defenses (default parameters in parentheses). First: if a single client address makes too many concurrent connections (>100), hang up on further connections. Second: if a single client address makes circuits too quickly (more than 3 per second, with an allowed burst of 90) while also having too many connections open (3), refuse new create cells for the next while (1-2 hours). Third: if a client asks to establish a rendezvous point to you directly, ignore the request. These defenses can be manually controlled by new torrc options, but relays will also take guidance from consensus parameters, so there's no need to configure anything manually. Implements ticket 24902.

Major bugfixes (netflow padding):

Stop adding unneeded channel padding right after we finish flushing to a connection that has been trying to flush for many seconds. Instead, treat all partial or complete flushes as activity on the channel, which will defer the time until we need to add padding. This fix should resolve confusing and scary log messages like "Channel padding timeout scheduled 221453ms in the past." Fixes bug 22212; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.